Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford and all-around war criminal, once remarked of the war between Khomeini’s Iran and Saddam’s Iraq, “A pity they can’t both lose.” Nobody ever said the would-be American Metternich lacked wit.
I can’t think of a better fit for Kissinger’s sentiment than the jihad Ron DeSantis and his merry gang of Farce/Fascist Florida Republicans have declared on the Disney Corporation. As detailed in Carl Hiaasen’s book, Team Rodent, the entertainment conglomerate founded by everyone’s favorite racist, union-busting Mouseketeer long ago worked out a deal with the Sunshine State that allowed it to carve out a huge chunk of land near Orlando for its theme park, where it enjoys virtual sovereign immunity, exemption from all kinds of laws and regulations, not to mention avoiding millions and millions of dollars in taxes. The Farce-Fascisti now want to take all that away, not because it is an egregious example of corporate welfare that has cost the residents of Florida God knows how much since Disney World opened its gates in the 1950s, but because the corporation dared to criticize the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Seriously, who do you root for in this disgusting smackdown? The hell of it is, this is definitely a sign of things to come, after the expected MAGA takeover of Congress in the November elections and its conquest, by fraud and force if necessary, of the White House in ’24. The Very Stable Genius Trump showed the way during his dress rehearsal for American-style fascism from 2017 to 2021, going after Amazon because its owner, Jeff Bezos, also bought the Washington Post. What shall we anti-fascists do about this political persecution of giant, multinational corporations? What is our position to be? These entities do not, of course, have any values except making money. If they pretend to be environmentally friendly or to support LGBTQ rights, it is only because they think it will gain them more customers. But if Farce-Fascist governments in America, India, Hungary, etc. are allowed to attack corporations on purely political grounds, they will quickly turn their nations into crony-capitalist monstrosities where you cannot run a business of any size without giving political fealty to the mafia-like powers that be. Free-market capitalism is indeed a great wealth-creating machine that can benefit society at large, as long as the public keeps it under control so that all the wealth doesn’t go to people like Jeff Bezos and the Disney honchos, and everyone is guaranteed the necessities of life including health care. A mixed economy, in other words. Crony capitalism is the worst of all worlds; its end result is a society like Putin’s Russia. People like Trump and DeSantis have taken America a long way down this road to hell.
Emanuel Goldstein 